Living Life Off the Leash
Twelve years ago, I said I would retire from my tenure track job at 67--I am beating that goal by two years, and thrilled about it
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In 2010, the New York Times asked me to write a short squib about retirement. Only two years after a financial meltdown that caused nearly all history departments to cancel their tenure stream searches that year, the academic job market seemed to be permanently anemic. Higher-ed pundits were shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Many, including some far too inexperienced to understand the dimensions of the job market collapse, proposed that the problem was not the failure to create jobs but the failure of aging faculty to retire.
That turned out to be a fantasy for many reasons. Mind you, no one in government or higher ed was saying (amid a presidency that was supposed to be the most progressive in decades): “Gee! If we only invested in full-time faculty jobs, there could be more of them!” The bottom line, for about 40 years, has been this: taxes are not popular, spending money on education is not popular, high tuition is not popular, but making excellent, affordable education appear as if by magic is extremely popular.
In any case, I picked up the challenge I was offered and announced in a national newspaper, at the ripe old age of 52, that I would retire in 15 years when I was 67. Why 67? I picked the date at random, in part. After all, it was the age at which I could get a reasonable Social Security payment, and it was younger than 70, which struck me then as quite old. I wrote:
Why go at 67? I believe that if senior scholars offer experience, young Ph.D.’s challenge us with new knowledge. Furthermore, while a classroom presence does not necessarily deteriorate with age, we don’t always notice, or want to admit it, when we become diminished. Setting a voluntary retirement date, well in advance of any decline, respects this reality.
Everybody at the university where I was employed at the time was shocked, but they were shocked by lots of things I did: blogging, speaking in faculty meetings, being too gay, and trying to come up for full professor without being a man.
But here’s something even more shocking. I am retiring at 65 when I am eligible for Medicare. That’s right—as of July 1, I go on a one-year step-down: 60% of my salary for 50% of the labor, which becomes full retirement on July 1, 2023. And it appears that I am not the only one: a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Fidelity Investments found that 55% of us are currently pondering retirement or changing careers.
Potential mass retirement in academia is very new. Even newer is that many of us have not reached the zone, which starts at around 70 and extends, in some cases, to almost 90. Back in 2010, I pointed out that the concept of academic retirement has all kinds of peculiarities that lead to this outcome. Primary among them is that—unlike other professions—in universities, no one talks about retirement as a desirable thing, either for the institution or the individual.
Faculty talk about retirement as if they are being buried alive. Administrators have no power to make anyone retire, and are weirdly afraid of age discrimination lawsuits (which rarely occur), so they act like conversations about retirement are Kryptonite. At my institution, when I wanted to pursue a conversation, it was hard even to figure out who to talk to. There was no information on the Human Resources website that tells a faculty member how to initiate retirement, much less offer incentives to make it attractive.
“Administrators want to retire our salaries but do little to help us overcome our fears,” I wrote in 2010. That was the understatement of the year. And people’s fears are real: what will they do with their time? Who will be their friends? How will they feel important? Does their family want to spend time with them? But the most ubiquitous fear is not having enough money, a worry that has probably become more salient since 2010. Academic salaries have flattened since 2000, and the stock market supporting our retirement accounts has become more volatile in the last 30 years.
But there are other financial worries too, one being that our salaries don’t support us as consumers in our own industry, and children are expensive little beasts. For decades, Americans have been delaying parenthood, and academics defer it even more because we don’t start making money, or saving for anything, until our late 20s or early 30s.
The economics of this situation directly impacts the willingness and ability to retire. Everyone wants job security before having children, and for academics, that means not just post-graduate school (which takes you to at least 28 years old) but post-tenure—the mid-30s. A recent study at UC Santa Barbara found that women in the sciences who become pregnant face open antagonism, and I have heard equally ugly stories from the humanities and social sciences.
Thus, at the point when faculty should be pumping money into retirement, they are paying for child care, saving for their children’s education, and paying tuition. Of course, faculty are also caught in the same vise as every other parent: college tuition has risen 33% since 2000. Male faculty who divorce and marry a significantly younger woman will pay for both sets of children over an even longer period of time. On top of this, there may be others in the family to support: our parents are living longer, and medical care is more expensive than ever.
One of the things that allowed me to retire early (even though we were in a commuting relationship and our housing expenses were higher than those of many colleagues) was not having children, and having a self-supporting mother and working spouse. But the decision to retire isn’t entirely economic. Like many people, during the pandemic, I learned how much doing a job I loved also deformed my life. So retiring at 65 is an opportunity to course-correct while I still have time for a new chapter.
Here are the four big things I look forward to.
The first big thing is having time, which is a precondition for everything else. I want to garden. I want to learn a musical instrument. I want to read wa-a-a-a-a-y outside my field. I want to volunteer for causes I am passionate about. I want to go to the beach in September. I want to go to Europe whenever I want. I may even want to do other jobs.
Most importantly, I want weekends, evenings, and vacations free from compulsory and unwanted tasks. For most of my career, if I did not catch up on reading, course prep, grading, email, committee assignments, tenure cases, and the mind-numbing number of tasks I get from university bots on Saturday and Sunday, the following week would be hell. And increasingly, working an unacknowledged 60-80 hour week is standard for a full-time academic position. So not only do we work on the weekends, we get up early and work, we work while we eat meals, and we do a couple of hours of work at night. When we are doing fun things, we are often thinking that we should be at work, which would be fine if we were working at a hedge fund, but at this salary, it really isn’t.
In other words, to paraphrase my friend Gina Athena Ulysse, I want to know what it feels like to work the way I choose. I want to live my life off the leash before it is too late.
The second big thing is being able to do work that excites me all the time, not just part of the time. In my case, this primarily means writing: finishing a book I am excited about on deadline without having to steal time from relationships and sleep, writing opinion pieces for news outlets, and diversifying my Substack platform with multi-media. But it also means reading more without having to steal time from writing, podcasting, and even taking small media and editing jobs that interest me but are not a forever commitment. It might mean doing politics. It might mean thinking about education more expansively than a university allows.
A third big thing is spending more time with my friends and family. I know: that is what Republican politicians say when they have been caught drunk driving, ass-grabbing, or toe-tapping in the men’s restroom. But in my case, it’s true. The intensity of the semester rarely leaves much space for casual visiting with friends. Vacations, rather than being free time, can be more like weekends during the semester: there is always a little bit of work stuffed in your suitcase. Making progress on writing projects, reading dissertation chapters, writing new syllabi, getting called in for the occasional meeting, and catching up on long-delayed reading often make hanging out on the porch with a novel seem impossible.
The fourth big thing? The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated and intensified dynamics in higher education that I have disliked for a long time, chief among them technology solutions. I don’t like it that so much of my job has steadily moved online since the oughts, and now seems to be there permanently. Faculty now do all their secretarial work via online programs that routinely send us messages on weekends and holidays to remind us about bureaucratic tasks that are either due or overdue.
In addition, I probably spend 2-4 hours a day simply answering emails. Conversations that used to happen in person now often require hours of typing. Every course I teach means 4-5 days of building a single Canvas platform before the term begins and probably 6 hours a week tending it. Multiply that by two courses, then add online grading, online attendance, filing expenses online, and all that email, and what does it tell you? It tells you why keeping to a 40-hour week is impossible for a college professor, and why my hands hurt so much at the end of the week that I can hardly open a jar, much less write without pain.
I could tell you a few other things that I no longer wish to deal with, but that would turn this post into a grump fest when I would like it to be inspirational. So, do I plan to stop working when I retire? Hell no!
But I am looking forward to setting my priorities, changing course when it seems fitting, indulging my creativity and intellect, and starting a new chapter of my intellectual life.
And I am glad you will all be here with me.
If you have ideas about retirement, please:
What I do when I am not writing this newsletter:
At Dame magazine this week, I speculate that the war for a democratic Ukraine could help Americans revive their democracy at home. “That Biden’s policies would reverse the isolationist policies and dictator-worship of the Trump era is unsurprising,” I write. “Yet the tragedy in Ukraine offers more: an opportunity to redefine what global democracy in the 21st century requires from the United States at home as well as abroad.” (June 1, 2022)
Short takes:
This week, following the massacre of Black shoppers in Buffalo, New York State passed a law (102-47) banning anyone under 21 from owning a semi-automatic rifle. “Besides raising the legal purchase age to 21, the bill would require anyone buying a semiautomatic rifle to get a license — something now only required for handguns,” Marina Villeneuve reports at The Hill. New Yorkers under 21 are already banned from owning handguns and may own single-shot weapons. (June 2, 2022)
Let’s hope the Democrats can deliver what they have promised when the J6 hearings go prime time next week. As Zachary Cohen and Ryan Nobles of CNN.com explain, June 6 is the start date for this prime time political performance: “The first hearing will be a broad overview of the panel's 10-month investigation and set the stage for subsequent hearings, which are expected to cover certain topics or themes” that the public is not yet aware of. Don’t expect, however, that there will be a shift towards consensus about presidential wrongdoing, as we saw during the Watergate hearings when evidence of Nixon’s crimes emerged. (June 2, 2022)
“The nation’s $1.7 trillion in student loan debt is an economic albatross,” Helaine Olen writes at the Washington Post, and debt cancellation is a good idea. But without significant reforms, it will be groundhog day in higher education: students running up the debt and colleges paying their bills with money borrowed by other people. “Forgiveness simply kicks the bucket down the road,” Olen explains. “It does not solve the larger issues: why college got so expensive, and how we as a nation should help people pay the tab.” (June 1, 2022)
I love, love, love this essay, which I hope gets picked up by some other outlet because more people need to read it. Of course, you know I gave up on institutions and became a freelance worker way back in 1989, which is why I am poorer than I should be at my age, but also why I am able to do creative work that never would have happened otherwise given the sort of person I am. I love that you're going to learn an instrument! How about guitar? Because then, when you see more of family, which will mean seeing more of me (yes, I do want to see you more), we can play together, something we used to do when we were kids and, as I remember, was a helluva lot of fun. Congratulations!
Dear Claire, Thanks for this view from above. Here is a sketch of a different alternative -- from my academic career at an older age. Realizing in my second decade of college teaching that I would probably never land tenure track -- the impossible dream -- I did find a very interesting departmental niche at a very famous university that placed me in a very different kind of classification. One of my male mentors, a previous department chair, explained that my job would not likely be as well paid or safe as the tenured thing, BUT I would likely be secure if I did the work and kept on publishing at a rate that kept my publications and contributions in view. He called my status "moral tenure" and that is how I continued.....in time there were occasional paid semester leaves, modest raises and respect from old time colleagues and newcomers who were interested in how I was handling the challenges. My ambition sharpened and my focus got strong. My spouse and I became mothers and eventually I got the leave that took me, after 20 years of research/writing/editing -- to a respectable university press that warmly took the work and supported the distribution. The book came out in 2015 and was well reviewed and cited by scholars I respect. It's still in print and I expect it will have a good run for some time.